
Class B V^ '■ ■ r^ 

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CQEOUGHT DEPOSm 



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COLLEGE AND RELIGION 



Talks to College Students by a College Teacher 



WILLIAM HARDY ALEXANDER, Ph.D. 

Professor of Classics at the University 
of Alberta, Canada 




BOSTON 
RICHARD G. BADGER 

THE GORHAM PRESS 



Copyright, 1920, by Richard G. Badger 



All Rights Reserved 






Made in the United States of America 



The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A. 



SEP |3f9?n ©CU576345 



PREFACE 

The seven addresses herein are selected from 
my Sunday morning talks to students during the 
past three years. They have been chosen mainly 
because I have been able to ascertain through 
chance expressions of opinion among the young 
men and women themselves that these are all 
talks which have awakened a response in the 
hearers. I am bold enough to hope that this 
judgment may be endorsed in a wider field. 

Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. 
June, 1920. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

1 "And to Virtue Knowledge'' .... 9 

2 Proving and Holding Fast 20 

3 The Alchemy of Struggle 32 

4 A Great University 46 

5 Faint yet Pursuing 59 

6 Making the Grade 78 

7 Commencement 93 



COLLEGE AND RELIGION 



COLLEGE AND RELIGION 



"AND TO VIRTUE KNOWLEDGE" 

"And besides this, giving all diligence, add to your faith 
virtue, and to virtue knowledge/' 

ad Epistle General of Peter, i, 5. 

I HAVE heard it said that teaching is a monot- 
onous profession; perhaps I have even thought 
so sometimes. It does involve a good deal of rou- 
tine; t's must be crossed and i's dotted, amo is con- 
jugated this year just as it was last year, (x + y) ^ 
continues to furnish the same old result. The 
same old experiments must be set up to prove the 
same old laws of nature, the same old volumes 
translated, the same old difficulties explained, 
and, as student tradition runs, the same old lec- 
tures delivered. But all this overlooks the com- 
ing into our college life year by year of a new 
generation of young scholars with all the won- 
der of varying personality they bring with them 

and all the possibilities they suggest. It was old 

-9 



10 College and Religion 

Friedrich Froebel, I think, who used to doff his 
hat to the children he met in the streets because 
he saw in them the leaders of to-morrow; he had 
the courage to carry into action what the real 
teacher feels at heart. Then, too, from each 
new class the wise teacher drains a draught of 
the wine of youth which it has so abundantly to 
spare, and renews with it his hope and faith and 
courage for the task of life. His is the great 
and the unusual opportunity, too often under- 
valued, to combine within himself a growing vol- 
ume of experience and the gaiety of youth, which 
at the best is an ideal existence, and at the worst 
affords a means of growing old gracefully. 

But it is not the teacher who has all the privi- 
leges; w^hat of you before whom to-day swings 
open the portal of college life? Why, it is no 
exaggeration, even if it is sadly trite, to say that 
the world is yours at that age. Fortune coquettes 
with you at eighteen, twenty, twenty-two, while 
she seeks to know what is in you ; by the time you 
are forty, she proves more a step-mother than a 
mistress, and puts you definitely in your place 
and bids you stay there. That is the reason why 
with each returning college year there comes a 



''And to Virtue Knowledge^* 



II 



yearning desire in my mind to say a word in sea- 
son, not of a sort to save you from every mis- 
take, because there are no such golden words as 
that for the game of life, but such as might set 
you thinking about one or two fundamentals in 
that game. It will be kindlier advice than sopho- 
mores give freshmen, though probably no better 
meant. 

Writing many hundred years ago an ancient 
father of the Christian faith, Simon Peter, was 
moved to lay down for the youthful society a sort 
of curriculum, very remarkable for its range and 
yet equally for its conciseness. *'And besides this, 
giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue, and 
to virtue knowledge." This is the substance of 
one course or period of training in the school of 
character. The first post-graduate course fol- 
lows; "and to knowledge temperance, and to tem- 
perance patience, and to patience godliness." A 
fairly ambitious programme ! But there is yet 
another post-graduate course to which you are 
admitted after qualifying in the former two; ''and 
to godliness, brotherly kindness, and to brotherly 
kindness, love." Fortunately for us we do not 
now have to take into account these post-grad- 



12 College and Religion 

uate studies; you are just becoming undergrad- 
uates, and graduation, even from the first course, 
is blissfully far removed in a haze of golden days. 
So we open Simon Peter's calendar at the under- 
graduate course once more and read again in this 
catalogue which for brevity is unrivalled among 
college catalogues : "And besides this, giving all 
diligence, add to your faith virtue, and to virtue 
knowledge." 

Is this as simple as it looks? "Giving all dili- 
gence;" is it easy to give diligence? Is it easy 
to go farther yet and to give all diligence in the 
prosecution of a study or the cultivation of a 
character? You and I know that it is not, and 
yet here it is made a prime condition, a pre- 
requisite of getting along at all. And now you 
are anticipating the worst; well, it must none the 
less be said that you will not gain much knowl- 
edge to add to virtue without diligence. Genius 
has been defined times without number as a ca- 
pacity for hard work, and there is nothing for 
which I have a more profound respect, nothing 
from which I anticipate sounder and more endur- 
ing results, than the patient industry that gives 
"all diligence." Here is the point. When you 



'^And to Virtue Knowledge^* 13* 

are studying, give "all diligence." Don't be half 
on the football field and half at your text book; 
don't mix your dress for the sophomore hop with 
fragments of Quintus Horatius Flaccus. When 
you are doing calculus, concentrate and do cal- 
culus ; build those castles in Spain some time to be 
sure, because building castles is a knightly occu- 
pation and Spain is a fair country, but don't build 
in calculus time. When you tell your instructor 
that you spent three hours in preparation, be 
sure in your own conscience you are not giving 
him one hour of preparation and two of war sub- 
stitutes. 

But did you ever realize that the making_ of 
character, the "adding to your faith virtue," is, 
just as much as your studies, a matter of dili- 
gence? Just consider a moment the wondrous 
chemistry of character; in that laboratory there 
are a hundred experiments going forward, many 
of them fraught with absolutely determinative 
results for your happiness and welfare, but you 
will have to give all diligence in the watching of 
them. It is a tedious business to be sure and 
entails hanging around the laboratory a good 
deal, but then there is no other way; God has 



14 College and Religion 

appointed this, and you and I must walk in it. If 
you want a character that is worth while to your- 
self and to other people you must "keep your 
heart with diligence, for out of it are the issues 
of life." Keeping your heart means among other 
things setting a guard upon the tongue, it means 
the calling in of idle thoughts and of thoughts 
that have gone wandering in forbidden ways, it 
means discerning sound and true motives and 
translating them into actions sound and true. A 
great sage was once asked what was the happy 
life and replied: "The life that brings the few- 
est regrets." There will be many years for you 
to live when youth is passed; in those years it 
will be great gain that your life in retrospect 
should bring you the minimum of regrets. All 
this may sound dull, but it is not necessarily so 
tedious as it seems. You girls know how it w^as 
with the knitting when you began it, how pain- 
fully you watched and counted, and then by and 
by it became an instinct and you plained-and- 
purled with an unconscious ease. It is not quite 
so simple in adding character to your faith, but 
in a general way it is the same; such is the nature 
of the will that a good resolution adhered to a 



'^And to Virtue Knowledge^^ 15 

few times in succession forms the nucleus of a 
good habit, which in turn almost automatically 
engenders good deeds. "Keep your heart with 
all diligence"; trifle with your studies a bit if you 
will, but beware of trifling with your self-respect, 
your sense of honor, your finer nature, your per- 
sonal cleanness. These are all sensitive material 
and can be so irreparably damaged, and so life is 
soured and spoiled sometimes in its beginning and 
all its gold early turned to tinsel. 

But you remember that Simon Peter spoke of 
this character, this ^'virtue," as an addition to 
your faith. Of faith let us take to-day the widest 
possible view; faith is a deep-seated belief in the 
reality of life and its purposes. That sort of 
faith seems to ine fundamental; it is the sort of 
thing you have to have at the very base of your 
life if you are to go on living at all. Why get 
knowledge, why get character, why get temper- 
ance, why cultivate a dozen other good and en- 
gaging qualities if you are but a squirrel in a 
cage, working his poor treadmill furiously and in 
the end accomplishing nothing? I hope you have 
this faith in the real worth of life, in the reaUty 
of the Eternal behind life, and in the reality of 



1 6 College and Religion 

the task which in collaboration with God you 
must perform. Such a faith has nothing to fear 
from a university course; it is capable of making 
the adjustments that a widening knowledge will 
certainly suggest. 

"And to virtue, knowledge." First faith in 
life and the reality of its purposes, then char- 
acter built upon that faith, then knowledge the 
better to enable you to act your part whatever 
that may be. There opens up before you the glori- 
ous opportunity to complete the necessities of 
faith and character with the grace and the beauty 
of knowledge. There is the whole field of litera- 
ture ancient and modern, sacred and profane, 
in which is gathered all the thought of all the 
ages to which you are now in the fullness of time 
become the heir, and not only is thought there 
but you will find it decked out with all the choice 
flowers of the garden of language. There is 
the marvellous book of science, that grand and 
stately volume the leaves of which are the starry 
heavens, the ocean-floors, and the eternal hills; 
you are to have a chance to peer at all the mys- 
tery within. There is the scroll of history preg- 
nant with meaning for the present and for the 



^'And to Virtue Knowledge^* 17 

future to those who can interpret It and read 
understandingly therein, the store-house of the 
political and economic wisdom of a hundred gen- 
erations and more of men. Surely no slackness, 
no arms that hang down or knees that are feeble, 
will keep you from getting what in these fields is 
justly yours. 

For the fact remains that these things must be 
added, and that the addition means work. Some- 
how or other it does not seem to be the order of 
the universe that you can get anything that is 
worth while for nothing. The fine fruit of litera- 
ture, the revelations of science, the lessons of his- 
tory, do not enter into the fabric of your being 
unsolicited and unwrought for; they are all pearls 
of great price, and the price must be paid or there 
is no transaction. Don't think that you can add 
knowledge to yourself simply by attendance at 
college; knowledge is not an infection which you 
can incur at a seat of learning. No, you will not 
get much in the way of knowledge merely by at- 
tending lectures and seeing demonstrations and 
hearing interesting talks; you will have to offer 
more substantial coin than that. I hope you have 
come prepared with the price. 



1 8 College and Religion 

We may not to-day discuss those stages of edu- 
cation which the apostle represents as lying be- 
yond the first course, but there are such stages, 
and an advance through these is what constitutes 
the full sum of education. Temperance, patience, 
godliness, brotherly kindness, love, — that is quite 
a formidable list. But are there any qualities in 
that list with which one who is seeking the per- 
fection of manhood or womanhood would care 
to dispense? And if there are not, is it not de- 
sirable that we should know the way by which we 
may go on to attain all of them in some measure, 
even if we know that we cannot adequately attain 
in all? Now you know how it is at college; you 
must pass through certain lower courses to reach 
the more advanced courses, and you must obtain 
certain lower degrees as the passport to higher 
degrees. Are you aware of any principle in the 
great university of life which should cause things 
to be different there? No, it is line upon line, 
precept upon precept, here a little and there a 
little, the winning of this or that as a vantage 
ground from which to push on to something else. 

There is nothing in my reminder that knowl- 
edge is an essential step tFat is inconsistent with 



'^And to Virtue Knowledge^' 19 

the best of good times; it is your privilege with 
all this to reap a full harvest of the joy of youth. ^ 
Still, youth is a season of preparation, too, and 
if you are ever to perform this great sum in the 
addition of qualities, you must be setting about it 
even now. God speed you as you begin and bring 
you in good time to the complete result. 



PROVING AND HOLDING FAST 

"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." 

I Thessalonians, 5, 2i. 

This fifth chapter of First Thessalonians is 
remarkable for the number of abrupt, pithy say- 
ings it holds in small compass. That is not St. 
Paul's ordinary style; he runs rather to long sen- 
tences, and sometimes gets himself so involved 
that he never succeeds in getting out of the tangle 
again even with the vigorous aid of all the com- 
mentators. But another mood was on him this 
day, and he writes very simply and directly, as if 
remembering how much like inexperienced chil- 
dren in a naughty neighborhood these Christians 
of Thessalonica were, and how much therefore 
like children they would stand in need, not of 
long, doctrinal sermons, but of practical precepts 
on which to lean in hour of trial. And so they 
come, these maxims, in a veritable string of 
pearls, each beautiful in itself but yet more beau- 
tiful in the necklace wherein it is set. 

20 



Proving and Holding Fast 21 

"Follow that which is good." Follow it, you 
observe; don't be worried for fear that you may 
possibly get ahead of it. The good is an ideal; 
you and I have never caught up to it and never 
will altogether, so great is the handicap the good 
has over us. Never mind; the point is not to sit 
down supinely but to be up and doing, to follow, 
— and that implies motion, activity, — in a good 
lead. 

"Be at peace among yourselves." Paul, you 
remember, was a travelling bishop, episcopos, 
overseer, with quite a big diocese to cover and a 
good many churches to visit on his round. I im- 
agine it is a trying experience; how weary he 
must have got of it all and them all sometimes 
with their eternal bickerings in which he had to 
act as umpire, adjuster, peace-maker and diplo- 
matist until he must have wondered what use 
there was in trying to preach the "peace of God 
that passeth all understanding" to pagans when 
his Christian converts squabbled so pettily and 
wrangled over such futile points of difference. It 
would be a better world for nations and for in- 
dividuals if we could only make up our minds to 
"be at peace among ourselves." 



22 College and Religion 

"Rejoice evermore!" What a good word! 

Don't frown, growl, or grguch; smile, laugh, be 

happy, "rejoice evermore." And "evermore," 

notice, — not just simply when you're feeling good 

and well-disposed and kindly, but at those other 

times too when your nerves are on the rack and 

you are sorely put to it for the next move, trying 

to keep your head 

"when those about you 
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you." 

The happiness that you do not have to use on 
prosperous days lay aside as your balance for the 
days that are dull and full of sorrow and pain. 
Is it true what Father Faber wrote : 

"Mostly men's many-featured faces wear 
Looks of indifference or of blank despair"? 

One does not like to think so, but does our coun- 
tenance bring sunshine where it goes? 

"Pray without ceasing." But how shall we of 
the modern world, crowded with pressing duties, 
innumerable engagements, insistent worries, and 
thronging cares, — how shall we "pray without 
ceasing"? Most of us solve it, I fancy, by ceas- 
ing without praying, from which state only five 



Proving and Holding Fast 23 

minutes or so on a Sunday morning delivers us. 
But perhaps it all hangs on what you call prayer. 
You remember the psalmist's description of the 
stars, ''there is no speech nor language, their 
voice is not heard." That is the way with un- 
ceasing prayer; it has no speech nor language nec- 
essarily, perhaps its voice is not heard, but just 
forms one of the diapason undertones of the har- 
mony of the world. "Work is prayer" says the 
punning Latin, and it is true that we can so hallow 
and ennoble our work that it is all a prayer, and 
that men see upon our faces reflected a glory that 
comes from contact with the infinite. "Pray 
without ceasing." Prayer is like everything else 
in human experience; the reward is for perseve- 
rance, there are no honors to the slacker. 

But of all these maxims the acme is reached 
in that which rings down the long hall of the 
ages with encouragement to scholar and thinker; 
"prove all things, hold fast that which is good." 
The two parts of this must not be separated. 
"Prove all things," — there you have the appeal 
intellectual which should be graven in letters of 
gold on tablets of silver at the gate of every 
school and college, and made axiomatic to their 



24 College and Religion 

being. Get knowledge and understanding, and 
use them to try, test, and prove the propositions 
moral, intellectual, spiritual, political, social, 
which force themselves on your consideration in 
these times. Don't jump at conclusions; prove 
all things, think them out to a finish, force them 
to undergo the acid test of thought. And, mark 
you, "all things"; there is none exempted before 
this tribunal, no, not one. Into the crucible of 
thought must go all our problems, and" that means 
our religious problems as well as the others. 
"Prove all things" ; as Plato puts it with the fine 
courage of the Greek intellect, "let us follow the 
argument whithersoever it leads," regardless of 
the fact that it may cross abruptly at right angles 
the lines of traditional belief and social conven- 
tion, resolved that for us at least there must be a 
resolute facing of the issues and not merely a 
turning away of the eyes to vanity from pain. 

But that is not all. St. Paul adds, "hold fast 
that which is good." This is really what I want 
to engage your attention in, the pleasure and in- 
deed the privilege of entertaining some definite 
convictions. There is a class of people who suffi- 
ciently comply with the duty of proving all 



Proving and Holding Fast 25 

things ; they read, they study, they meditate, they 
go through all the intellectual motions prepara- 
tory to reaching a conviction, but never, so far 
as any one can discover, have they actually enter- 
tained a definite conviction on any thing. When 
you endeavor to ascertain their views they be- 
come as elusive as an eel and about as valuable 
intellectually. And the remarkable thing is that 
many of them pride themselves upon it and speak 
of their mental attitude as impartial, detached, 
unbiassed, and what not. Nay, I record with 
peculiar shame that the consensus of civihzed 
mankind has given to s,uch a state of mind the 
epithet "academic,^' which indicates how com- 
monly in human experience professors get so in- 
terested in merely testing all things that they 
never attain to certainty in anything. 

Now the intellectual test and the intellectual 
conclusion are of no avail unless translated into 
action. The mystic who stays forever up on the 
Mount of Transfiguration plays no part in the 
uplift of the world; it is the man who comes 
down among the crowd again with shining face 
that really counts. The real leader of mankind 
is some Moses who scales the Sinai peak and 



26 College and Religion 

brings back the law to the men of the plain. So 
then to intellectual judgment must be added moral 
resolution, to stand fast in the plain by what you 
feel you have on the mountain discovered to be 
true. A fine phrase that "hold fast" ! To stand, 
to hold fast, to have some definite ideal of good 
in religion, government, education, and society, 
some exact purpose in life, some ordered view of 
man and existence, and to have the courage, the 
uncommon courage, to stand by your views, to 
have some definite convictions, — there is the 
measure of a man or a woman. 

This does not mean just being obstinate; con- 
stantly in warfare the tactician will change his 
mind about the real value of a position and will 
relinquish it because he no longer thinks it worth 
while to hold it. So it is with every one of us; 
entertaining some definite convictions need prove 
no obstacle to change as we keep constantly prov- 
ing them from time to time. If a man tells me 
that his views have not changed in ten years, I 
suspect him to be the victim of a strange disorder, 
the sleeping sickness. There is a dash of senti- 
ment, no doubt, in saying that my father's politi- 
cal convictions are good enough for me, but it 



Proving and Holding Fast 27 

does not argue much exercise of the thinking 
power. The conservatism of the mule is not 
usually the subject of a eulogium. 

But what, you say, are these few definite con- 
victions which you esteem it a pleasure and in- 
deed a privilege to entertain? I hope you do not 
suppose I am going to inflict my particular set 
upon you or to suggest that there is any standard 
ready made to which you can make yours con- 
form. It would be a dull world if we were all in 
agreement; it is out of the variety of convictions 
that progress arises. And if I have said "some" 
or "a few" it is only to suggest that there is an 
irreducible minimum of conviction which is essen- 
tial to distinguish a man or a woman from a 
jelly-fish. 

Oh these jelly-fishes in human life ! They float 
everywhere upon its sea. They have no convic- 
tions about the social order in which they Hve, 
whether it is right or wrong, or partly right and 
partly wrong, and why; they are jelly-fishes float- 
ing in the tide of social conventions. They con- 
tract, — ^you know how sensitive jelly-fishes are! 
— at the bare mention of politics and at the idea 
of any one having strong and positive opinions 



28 College and Religion 

upon the parties and their policies, especially a 
woman, assuming apparently that government is 
a kind of Providence surrounding their lives, until 
some awful cataclysm comes in history and the 
government demands some return in service, yes, 
even from jelly-fishes. They have no views upon 
morals, private or public, except so far as these 
relate to the possibility of scandal; as to the ori- 
gin, significance, and probable evolution of the 
moral ideal, as to its relation to religion, as to 
the possibility of its existence apart from religion, 
they have no convictions. And in religion the 
jelly-fishes run true to type; they are always 
found in very safe and very shallow waters, never 
venturing out into the depths of the stirring tide, 
especially when it draws once again into the vasty 
deep. 

But why the pleasure and the privilege? First 
then, the privilege. A privilege, as its derivation 
indicates, was a special legal enactment under the 
Roman law in favor of some specific individual, 
or some special right acquired by an individual 
and recognized as valid by the law. It was some- 
thing which distinguished him from the general- 
ity and set him apart. If you have a few definite 



Proving and Holding Fast 29 

convictions upon life at which you have arrived 
after proving them this way and that, you have a 
privilege, never doubt it. God has legislated spe- 
cially in your case and conferred on you a privi- 
lege. But remember^ that privilege like nobility, 
if it carries rights, implies responsibilities as well; 
not for no purpose have you been emancipated 
from the servitude of the jelly-fishes. This privi- 
lege of having some definite convictions is a cry- 
ing need of our modern world; there seems to be 
abroad a general tendency to blur in every de- 
partment of human thought, to talk increasingly 
about "suspension of judgment" which is often 
just a ponderous term for laziness, to get into 
that condition, that painfully "academic" condi- 
tion, which was never better described than as 
"always learning and never coming to a knowl- 
edge of the truth." 

The pleasure you may think rather doubtfully 
of; the person of even a few definite convictions 
is likely to encounter trouble among the jelly-fish, 
some of whom nature has endowed with stings. 
Yet there is pleasure after all, the pleasure of 
standing square with the truth as you saw it and 
the pleasure of having exercised strength rather 



30 College and Religion 

than just having yielded to lassitude, weakness, 
and convention. It is not pleasure as the world 
commonly defines it; *'peace I leave with you, my 
peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth, 
give I unto you" but a peace which the world can 
neither give nor take away. It is the summa 
voluptas, the highest pleasure of philosophy, the 
satisfaction in the exercise of the supremest 
powers of being. The world's lash will hurt and 
its sting will wound unless you are constituted 
with a peculiar skin of indifference round about 
you, but you will be compensated by the pleasure 
you will find in your own society, and after all, as 
Stevenson put it, to keep friends with one's self, 
to preserve self-respect, is no mean task. 

I shall not pursue this thought farther; it is for 
you to make the personal decision for or against 
being a jelly-fish, though I should be sorry to 
think that any of you would thus deliberately 
climb down the ladder of life to a lower order of 
being. I hope some of you will think it worth 
while to try in your college years to get some con- 
victions, to escape the reproach of Laodiceanism. 
"I know thy works that thou art neither cold nor 
hot ... so then because thou art lukewarm and 



Proving and Holding Fast 31 

neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my 
mouth." In the plan and purpose of God there 
is neither room nor place for the inveterate com- 
promiser in the road of progress; men and yeomen 
and churches and universities and societies and 
nations must prove all things in their constitu- 
tions, must attain some measure of conviction, 
must hold fast. And saith the Lord: "To him 
that overcometh," — the warrior, you observe, not 
the jelly-fish — "will I give to eat of the tree of 
life which is in the midst of the paradise of God." 



THE ALCHEMY OF STRUGGLE * 

Ah, you say, that is an odd-looking word, that 
"alchemy," not one of the friendly counters of 
everyday speech! It is a rare word now, but 
time was when the fond hopes of Europe centred 
upon it, for was not alchemy the magic that was 
to transmute all metals into gold? Getting rich 
quickly is no new dream; every age has its own 
form of the delusion, and of all these forms 
none is quainter, none more fascinating, than the 
search of the alchemists for the philosopher's 
stone, the medium by which all baser elements 
were to be converted into the noblest element of 
them all. Alchemy of the Middle Ages has settled 
down into the no less fascinating and far more 
scientific pursuit of Chemistry, but for all that 
we turn back a little wistfully at times to the days 
when magic hovered around the crucrSle and the 
test-tube, and when the man of science himself 

* The writer acknowledges gratefully that the whole idea 
of thus interpreting Jacob's struggle comes to him from a 
sermon of the Rev. W^illiam Channing Gannett, entitled 
"Wrestling and Blessing." 

32 



The Alchemy of Struggle 33 

believed in the occult properties of the elements 
he worked with. 

I could have been more thoroughly modern, 
more strictly up-to-date, by making my subject, 
*'The Chemistry of Struggle," but I believe it 
would have been at the sacrifice not only of ro- 
mantic suggestion but even of actual truth. 
Chemistry implies an exact science wherein from 
things given follow inevitably certain things found 
and demonstrated; the magic touch has passed 
away like "the glory from the earth." But I am 
not willing to admit that it is just a precise science 
that explains the phenomena with which I pro- 
pose to deal; there is in them a touch of an- 
other something, magic if you will, other than 
mere material forces and above them, which 
makes me cling to the less usual term "alchemy.'* 
And then too in the processes I shall consider the 
alchemist's goal is in part at least reached, and 
base metal is transmuted divinely into pure gold 
of character. 

The story of Jacob's wrestling as we read it in 
the chapter of Genesis is an eerie legend of that 
sort which men of learning call etiological; it is 
one of that class of legends which purport to give 



34 College and Religion 

the historical explanation of some name, some 
custom, some religious rite. Among the children 
of Israel a strange practice prevailed of "eating 
not of the sinew which is upon the hollow of the 
thigh," and as men questioned themselves and 
others upon the origin of things in a more sophis- 
ticated age, the story of Jacob and the Mysterious 
Wrestler emerged. Such legends are common in 
the lore of all nations, arising from the natural 
and insatiable curiosity of man about himself and 
his environment. 

But like many another legend, though of little 
worth from the standpoint of history or science, 
it is full of the deepest spirit of poetry. What a 
series of pictures you have there, so perfectly em- 
balmed in the arnber of tradition! The lonely 
Jacob, weary and depressed; the nameless visitor', 
all unannounced, who comes to grips with him; 
the close-locked wrestle througli the long night 
hours; the miraculous touch; the desire on the 
stranger's part to be gone before daybreak, as all 
fairies and demons and ghostly visitants have 
ever wished; Jacob's invincible hold; his demand 
for blessing as the price of release; the new name 
of Israel, "prince with God" ; the mystery of the 



The Alchemy of Struggle 35 

stranger's name preserved throughout; Jacob's 
shrewd guess and commemorative name, Peni-el, 
"God's face"; and then, as he crosses the brook 
Jabbok, sunrise, the golden dawn, daylight once 
more. I do not know that any literature con- 
tains a story more successful In combining In a 
short compass all the elements of fear, wonder, 
surprise, charm, beauty, — all that goes to make a 
great poem or drama. 

But the really great poem or drama never re- 
mains content with mere success of form or ar- 
rangement of material; it uses these but as a 
shrine for the Spirit of the whole. It Is not far 
to seek here. All night long in those silent hours 
men usually give to repose, Jacob wrestled body 
to body with a man of mystery who even lamed 
him before the struggle ended, but Jacob refused 
to relinquish his hold till from this Presence he 
had gained a blessing. Then when he thought 
It all over, he got a new view of what had been 
so fearsome in those night hours of agony, and 
concluded that he had seen in that struggle noth- 
ing other than "God's face." So, limping, he 
crossed the brook to join his company, and the 
sunshine burst full upon him In all Its dawn-glory. 



3 6 College and Religion 

Night, struggle, sorrow, anxiety, all these gone; 
as a prince he had wrestled and proved his power 
with God, and as he wrestled, he had seen God's 
face. Here in simplest, loveliest language stands 
revealed the most eternal of truths, that from 
wrestling comes blessing, from darkness light, 
from storm calm, and coronation from the long 
determined fight. 

But you say to me: "Ah, that is only a story 
after all, and it happened so long ago and so far 
away!" Wrong; no one of us escapes the expe- 
rience of Jacob, though it seldom strikes us as 
poetry or seems to be jewelled in a poetic setting 
when it does come, at least, that is the way we 
feel. Each one of us wrestles, desperately some- 
times, with mysterious forces that rob us of the 
hours of sleep. Some go down to defeat in that 
struggle so that they can have only God's mercy 
and not his seal and sign of approval, but others 
endure to the end, steadfast under maiming even 
of the heart and soul, and become princes with 
power, gaining a blessing so great that we find 
no words so adequate to describe it as the old 
words; they have seen God face to face. 

He comes to us in different forms, this Mys- 



The Alchemy of Struggle 37 

terious Stranger who lays hold of us so suddenly 
as he emerges from the unseen, and with so 
powerful a grip. One of his very commonest dis- 
guises is failure. Often to the student above all 
others the Sable Wrestler comes thus. The 
courses at college prove harder than one had 
thought, or perhaps, worse yet, we feel that we 
have not the powers of mind we imagined we had. 
The first test-results are best veiled by charity, 
the daily quizzes are a succession of trials, the 
professors appear to be the mind-readers of what 
you know not. Those are hours of darkness in- 
deed, and out of them the wrestler descends upon 
your soul and says: ^'Better give up. This is 
the wrong path for you to go. You have missed 
your calling. You are a failure." Dear lad or 
girl, he is touching the sinew in the hollow of 
your thigh to break your grip, but if you will 
"stay with him," as our phrase is, you will extort 
from him a blessing, even your heart's desire, and 
you will realize that you have been at Peni-el, 
and seen God's face. For the Sable Wrestler is 
none other than God and in the grim wrestle of 
the soul he sifts out the hearts of men and learns 
who best may serve as his collaborators. "You 



38 College and Religion 

will not hear me now," cried the young Disraeli 
to the jeering Commons, "but the time will come 
when you will have to hear me," and ultimately 
he spoke in that same chamber as Prime Min- 
ister. Professors who have not appreciated your 
freshman efforts may form an entirely different 
estimate of you before you graduate. 

Or he may come to you in the form of a re- 
curring temptation, the one to which your own 
heart tells you you are peculiarly susceptible, "the 
sin that doth so easily beset you." It will startle 
some of you to have me suggest that this is God's 
hand too, but I prefer to explain it thus than to 
be forced to the dualism of God and Devil. 
Well, in this matter of the recurring temptation 
we are all on common ground; "there is none 
righteous, no, not one." Oh, the strength of the 
Wrestler when he comes on this wise! He lays* 
hold of the very roots of your soul with a giant 
strength, especially when, like Jacob, you are 
lonely, harassed, and depressed, wrestles with 
you through the black hours of your soul-night, 
and withers the sinews of your resolution. Time 
and again he has come off so nearly victorious 
that only a sudden and violent effort saved you. 



The Alchemy of Struggle 39 

but at last you gather up all your soul's force and 
say: "I must get the better of this thing now 
and here." The Temptation realizes your mood, 
would fain be gone, but you grip it all the harder 
and will not let it go "except it bless thee." And 
presently you emerge a victor. The alchemy of 
struggle has refined your character in its retorts; 
base metal has come forth pure gold. You know 
that that temptation will have no power against 
you forever; you are a prince with God and have 
prevailed; and in your struggle you have seen 
God's face. There is the magic of our alchemy; 
through things temporal you have seen things 
eternal, and they have exercised their charm. 

Sometimes the Black Wrestler is curiously 
negative, as when he attacks you in the form of 
sheer inertia, physical, mental, or spiritual slack- 
ness. It is not then what he urges you to that is 
significant; it is what he would seek to withhold 
you from. All about you is work ready for your 
hands, your brain, your heart, but somehow noth- 
ing happens; it is clearly your move but no rock 
is more firmly rooted. The times are calling, oh, 
so loud and clear. Up, soldier, shoulder the rifle 
and take the field for freedom! Up, reformer, 



40 College and Religion 

mount the rostrum and speak a word for ad- 
vance! Up, teacher and preacher, forget out- 
worn traditions and beliefs and lift up the torch 
of the larger light, proclaim the wider gospel! 
For the love of all mankind, don't be a priest or 
a Levite and pass by on the other side ; don't en- 
roll yourself among the do-nothings when there 
is such a call for recruits in the army that is fight- 
ing for the positive purposes of God. Grip the 
Dark Stranger of Inertia, even when you feel him 
laming you. Grip him, man ! Grip him, woman ! 
Say: "Yes, I will go, I will work, I will fight, 
I will believe!" Oh, the boundless power of a 
positiYe purpose ; it can say to mountains of doubt 
and discouragement and despair ''Be ye removed 
hence and sunk in the depths of the sea!" No 
mere negation ever got anything anywhere. 
Come to grips then with inertia, doubt, hesita- 
tion, irresolution, hold fast to your purposes, and 
as the spirits of inertia leave you, you can de- 
mand of them the blessing. And in doing posi- 
tive service, in performing this duty and that 
rather than rebelling against it, you will see that 
great, new light which is called God's face. 
Perhaps he comes disguised as illness, either 



j The Alchemy of Struggle 41 

some sudden physical disaster or a chronic malady, 
and by touching your soul's sinew would reduce 
you to miserable, hopeless, helpless, complaining 
invalidism. Assuredly this is a painful wrestle 
by the brook Jabbok; there is none more so. You 
cannot run and play, skate or dance, like the other 
boys and girls because of the cruel illness that 
left you hurt and maimed those many years ago ; 
God grant you grace, child, for you have a hard 
wrestle to go through! Or you cannot see the 
flower's rare blossom break into bloom or catch 
the fleeting smile on a baby's face because the 
light in you is gone out by reason of that bullet 
at Passchendaale; perhaps from the struggle God 
can make light the darkness! Or you are just a 
little sick all the time with a malady that cannot 
be quite dislodged, and this is a perpetual trial 
because you live on the edge of the pleasant land 
where the healthy people are rushing about so 
vigorously; even in this there may be more of 
hope, more of prospect, than you had supposed. 
For think now! William, Prince of Orange and 
the third king of that name in the roll of British 
sovereigns, a statesman of wide vision and a gen- 
eral of skill and courage, was racked constantly 



42 College and Religion 

by asthma, both at home and in the field. Paul, 
the great apostle, had a thorn in the flesh, "the 
messenger of Satan to buffet him" as he calls it, 
for Paul was really a dualist in his conception of 
the moral government of the world. Parkman, 
whose historical works have illuminated Cana- 
dian history, was half-blind all his days from a 
blow struck during his residence at Harvard Col- 
lege. John Milton's light 

was spent 
Ere half his days in this dark world and wide. 
And that one talent which is death to hide 
Lodged with him useless,' 

and yet from that darkness emerged Paradise 
Lost. Or, if you will go to ancient Sparta, you 
will find there one Tyrtaeus, a poet, who though 
lame fired by his song^he souls of warriors for 
the fray. How many a sick room you can think 
of in your own experience where the patient suf- 
ferer has wrestled with pain, not one night only 
unto the breaking of the day but many a night, 
and refused to give in, to go without the bless- 
ing, and has suddenly gained at last the vision 
splendid to illuminate what was dark and unrea- 
sonable before, so that callers, as they go out 



The Alchemy of Struggle 43 

from the room, whisper reverently, "Peni-el, 
God's face." The process of this alchemy is te- 
dious to a degree, but its distillate is a rare es- 
sence indeed, the attar of roses of life. 

But sometimes the Sable Wrestler who comes 
upon us out of the night is the darkest shadow 
that can fall across a human soul, death, the 
death of one we loved far better than life itself; 
"would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my 
son, my son!" Then indeed the sinew of the 
soul is withered, and the wrestler bids fair to 
elude our grip and leave us nothing but the recol- 
lection of an hour when all the sky went black 
at once. Into the inner secret of a struggle such 
as that it is not given us to penetrate save by 
experience, nor is it considerate or profitable to 
attempt a psychological dissection. I will just 
say that in these long years of war I have seen 
fathers and mothers, wives and sweethearts, go 
through the agony and emerge with faces reflect- 
ing triumph over that last enemy, which is Death. 
God only knows how they won out, but I think in 
the end they must have had a glimpse of His 
face. 

And so throughout it is the story that Greek 



44 College and Religion 

drama proclaimed and that Jesus confirmed when 
he set his face steadfastly to go to Jerusalem, the 
story of characters "made perfect through suffer- 
ing." 

Cross that liftest up my head, 

1 dare not ask to fly from thee; 
I lay in dust life's glory dead, 

And from the ground there blossoms red 
Life that shall endless be. 

Suffering is the solvent which in the chemistry of 
character precipitates the unworthy elements and 
leaves the soul pure. It is not the native nugget 
which has the fairest shape but the gold refined 
under intense heat in the furnace and beaten into 
form under the infinite blows of the goldsmith's 
hammer. It is not the subject that came easiest 
to you that you really remember best or that goes 
most deeply into the tissues of your life; it is the 
one at which you wrestled even unto tears. It is 
not as a rule the child of ease and luxury who 
serves best the world and lives in the grateful 
hearts of men but some rail-splitter of Illinois, 
tried as by fire and refined by suffering till he 
reaches an apotheosis in the hearts of his country- 
men and of the world. A strange alchemist this 



The Alchemy of Struggle 45 

life of ours, working quietly, though we know it 
not, to decompose and reconstitute our natures. 
You may laugh at the idea of conversion, but it 
is a process going on every day in your heart, not 
suddenly like the electric flash except in rare in- 
stances, but by the slow and steady operation of 
soul-change. There is much to hearten us in that 
reflection; "no afiliction for the present seemeth 
joyous but grievous, but in the end it worketh the 
peaceable fruits of righteousness." Up then and 
on, if we have been hesitating to take hold of life 
steadily and whole and trying rather to dodge its 
difiiculty and distress; let us wait on this side of 
the brook Jabbok, strong of heart, fortified in 
resolution, for the Wrestler who will join us pres- 
ently to try for a fall. 



A GREAT UNIVERSITY, ITS COURSE 
AND ITS DEGREE 

Pilate therefore said unto him: Art thou a king then? 
Jesus answered: Thou sayest that I am a king. To this 
end was I born and for this cause came I into the world 
that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that 
is of the truth heareth my voice. Pilate saith unto him: 
What is truth? S. John i8: 37-8. 

Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him: 
If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed. 
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you 
free. S. John 8: 31-2. 

Within twenty years after the landing of the 
Pilgrim Fathers there was founded in New 
Towne, the future Cambridge, a college, the 
avowed purpose of which was, as the stranger 
may read from the inscription at the Main Gate 
facing the First Church, to secure a continuance 
of a godly and learned ministry for New Eng- 
land when their first pastors should lie moulder- 
ing in the dust. This was in 1636, and within a 
short time it received the name of its first bene- 
factor for its own, and became Harvard College 

46 



A Great University ^ Its Course and Degree 47 

in memory of John Harvard, minister of the 
church in Charlestown. There is no single finer 
thing at Harvard to-day than the statue of John 
Harvard sitting thoughtful and intent near Me- 
morial Hall, and the simple words on the base, 
"John Harvard, Founder," compare favorably 
with the rather lengthy inscriptions to which Har- 
vard runs. 

It was a small foundation, that original Har- 
vard College, but it was truly as the Harvard 
Ode says *'the first fruits of the wilderness," and 
if meagre for long years in equipment and 
scholarship, how rich it was in promise and in the 
development of men of character and worth! 
Much Latin and Greek of a kind, some very ele- 
mentary mathematics, some attention to writing 
clearly and to speaking, a little philosophy, that 
was about all the College offered, a veritable 
"oatmeal porridge" of education, the modern 
student would be apt to say. But you remember 
perhaps how upon Boswell's praising oatmeal and 
Dr. Johnson's bursting forth: "Oatmeal! Faugh! 
In Scotland the food of men, in England the food 
of horses!" Bozzy countered nicely by replying: 
"Ay, Doctor, and where will you find finer men 



48 College and Religion 

and finer horses?" The limited curriculum was 
soundly learned, and by it the soil of those young 
New England minds was broken for the sowing 
of great thoughts. If at the Harvard College 
of that day the student's field was circumscribed, 
.perhaps it would be fair to say that in the Har- 
vard University of to-day the field is all too vast. 
And what a great university the tiny college 
of the seventeenth century has grown to be ! Old 
Massachusetts Hall that carries us back two hun- 
dred years is but one among many brethren to- 
day. In that dear old yard with its lofty elms 
and green lawns, a place whose quaint simplicity 
is represented in the homely word ''yard," have 
grown up many structures dedicated to all the 
ologies, with the plain old dormitories Stoughton, 
HolHs, and Holworthy, still standing among them 
as the landmarks of venerable tradition. And 
away beyond the old yard, which no doubt seemed 
ample room for the college of early days, the 
great university has spread, evep seeking new 
acres of earth's fields as the field of knowledge 
grows. For Harvard has been true to university 
tradition and has followed the gleam; where a 
new trail of truth seemed to open, Harvard has 



A Great University ^ Its Course and Degree 49 

been ever ready to pursue it. "Let us follow the 
argument whithersoever it leads," Socrates used 
to say to his circle, and could you think of a finer 
inscription to be written over the front gate of 
any university that was sincerely interested in 
learning? Let us not just follow the argument 
for a while till we see if it is going to bring us 
into conflict with the religious and economic con- 
ventions of society; no, let us have the courage to 
follow it whithersoever it leads, even if that be 
to loss of supposed friends and discomfort and 
some real unhappiness for the time being. I make 
bold to think poorly of a university training that 
has not inspired students with the 'Vhitherso- 
ever" idea of Socrates, and the success of a uni- 
versity should be measured by the spirit of in- 
quiry it arouses in its scholars. If it is doing 
that, then there is no endowment too precious 
for the state to give such an institution or for 
private benefaction to provide. It is the chief 
glory of Harvard University that in it academic 
freedom to think out and to speak out exists 
practically unchallenged. 

There was another founder once, a preacher 
like John Harvard, who established in his life- 



50 College and Religion 

time a sort of peripatetic college, picking up his 
students everywhere. You remember how he 
found them. There were two of them who were 
fishing, and the teacher said: "Come along to 
my school and learn a greater fishing trade than 
that, the fishing for men's souls !" One was fol- 
lowing the plough, another had a dull job in the 
Customs House^ third was a young doctor with- 
out a practice, — all of these heard the Founder's 
call and were prompt to enroll in this strolling 
university, the history of which has occupied ever 
since so large a space on the canvas of human 
history. Were there any academfc inducements 
held out to them such as the B.A.'s and M.Sc.'s 
and Ph.D.'s and all the other alphabet of decora- 
tions that glitters before the student of to-day? 
Was there any prescribed course for them to fol- 
low or was all work just one glorious elective 
after another in the school of Jesus? Was it a 
school of really high aims, or was it, like some 
modern institutions, founded to bolster up ancient 
prejudices and decayed superstitions? 

In the second passage I read you, Jesus, after 
challenging strenuously a hostile public opinion, 
speaks again in the midst of a group of those who 



A Great University, Its Course and Degree 51 

had believed on him and speaks so plainly that 
many even of these go their ways and walk no 
more with him. What a strange college head is 
this, boldly daring to offend students and to send 
them away because he knows that they are not fit 
for the course he has in view, a course which will 
lead through Gethsemane to Calvary! But 
among the words he utters at that time we find 
some that deal with Jesus' view of the possibihty 
of reaching truth and the way of coming at it. 
"If ye continue in my word, then are ye my dis- 
ciples indeed, and ye shall know the truth." "Con- 
tinuing in the word," — there you have the condi- 
tion laid down upon the fulfilling of which you 
may remain in college ; by so continuing you show 
yourselves "disciples indeed," or, as we should 
say, real students, .^d what is the net result 
of so continuing and of being disciples indeed? 
Why, "ye shall know the truth," — a liberal edu- 
cation, you see, the thing so often talked about 
at college and so seldom got. This is no unat- 
tractive calendar, this of the school of Jesus, espe- 
cially in this last result so surely promised; let us 
investigate it a little. 

"Continuing in my word," — I do not see that 



52 College and Religion 

we must seek to attach to that phrase any mystic 
or peculiar significance ; it seems to me to indicate 
nothing more than abiding by the Teacher's rule 
of life, using it constantly, illustrating it, so far 
as may be, in every deed and in every word. And 
did he then give, as other masters have done, any 
rule of life, any "word" whereby we might walk? 
Do you remember the story of that shrewd and 
clever man of law who stood up to tempt him 
and asked: "Master, what shall I do to inherit 
eternal life?" and was made according to the 
soundest pedagogy to give the answer himself: 
"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy 
heart and with all thy soul and with all thy 
strength and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor 
as thyself." "Ay," said the Master, "thus do 
and thou shalt live." 

Eternal life begins here and now, since only 
by our life now are we prepared to step into Hfe 
hereafter, so that the answer to the man of law 
gives the key for all life; "this do and thou shalt 
live," now and evermore. Love the Lord thy 
God with all thy powers ; put thyself body, soul, 
and spirit in harmony with the Eternal Purposes ; 
get in tune with the Infinite; be a co-worker with 



A Great University^ Its Course and Degree 53 

God, help him to realize his work of creation by 
being loyal, kind, upright, honest, pure, by identi- 
fying thyself with all those great moral forces 
of the world to which life points through the ages 
of experience as to beacon-lights. Love thy 
neighbor as thyself, but lay not in thy zeal for thy 
neighbor too little stress upon thyself. Cultivate 
thyself, read, study, mark, learn, inwardly digest, 
get to love good music, to appreciate great books, 
to hang fondly upon rare pictures; raise thine 
own level and with it shall rise thy love for thy 
neighbor, thy desire that he too may enter in to 
the kingdom of the Beautiful and the Good. 

And If we continue In his word, If we co-oper- 
ate with God In his great purposes as revealed in 
experience and marked out by history, and if we 
cultivate ourselves and love our neighbor as our- 
selves, what shall be our reward? Mark you, we 
are elevated to the glorious company of disciples, 
discipuU, pupils, students. What a rare privilege ! 
The student always thinks the teacher is to be 
envied, the teacher constantly envies the student 
the chance that Is his to go apart and study, un- 
burdened by routine and committee meetings. 
Some fortunate ones are able to devote their 



54 College and Religion 

lives to study, and the mark of a rising civiliza- 
tion will be the extent to which we make it more 
possible for the deserving to do so. Disciples 
indeed! Much as I admire the winners of the 
V.C. and the D.S.O. and the D.C.M. and B.A.'s 
and Ph.D.'s and LL.D.'s, I admire still more 
those who are called to God's school to be "dis- 
ciples indeed." I do not know that they will ever 
get a parchment or win a degree such as other 
schools have to offer, but I am certain that they 
are promised a wonderful knowledge, and that 
after all is what counts. I had rather have the 
knowledge without the degree like Charles Dar- 
win who upset the world of thought than the 
degree without the knowledge for examples of 
which one might not need to go far afield. 

And what is this promise? What is the prom- 
ise made in the calendar of God's school for those 
who are enrolled for its courses as "disciples in- 
deed?" "And ye shall know the truth." We go 
into this school, matriculating by loving God and 
our neighbor and ourselves, and we shall know 
the truth. What truth? Of science? The root 
of life, the secret of the rocks, the magic of the 
elements? Oh, no, not that! Of history? The 



A Great University y Its Course and Degree 55 

real right and wrong of things, the inwardness 
of the motive for this and that? Oh, no, not 
that! Of politics? The best form of govern- 
ment, the best way of administering the best form 
and of rectifying the less good? Oh, no, not 
that ! What truth then ? Friends, the truth that 
will dawn upon us in proportion to the soundness 
of our matriculation knowledge in Jesus' law of 
life is this, that above science and history and 
politics and literature and language and art, 
comes the question of our integration into the 
Eternal Not-Ourselves, the question of our rela- 
tionship to God and man not as scientists or poli- 
ticians or men of letters or linguists or artists, but 
as men and women with pulsing human hearts. 
That, I believe, is the answer to Pilate's question : 
What is truth? and I think that Jesus' whole life 
and his death are a commentary in support of this 
fundamental proposition, that you must as a hu- 
man soul apart from all your dignities and pre- 
tensions get into touch with God and all other 
souls. 

I said there was no degree in the school of the 
''disciples indeed." Perhaps that was wrong, for 
hear the rest: "and the truth shall make you 



S6 College and Religion 

free." How one almost gasps at that word! 
"Free," — ^the hopes and the ambitions of suffer- 
ing humanit}^ are gathered in that word; for free- 
dom men and women too have died cheerfully 
and bravely; the magic of freedom's name drew 
our young men by tens of thousands overseas to 
withstand tyranny rampant. That word "free" 
has been ever the slave's sigh and the freeman's 
boast. But this freedom has been largely a ques- 
tion of the absence of physical restraint; it can- 
not compare with the freedom that truth shall 
confer upon us. The freedom truth brings in the 
school of the disciples is the freedom of soul that 
comes to the man who has realized his mission 
in the world as God's partner. For him life takes 
on a larger meaning; God's in his heaven and I 
am on the earth to do his will, not a mere arbi- 
trary will imperious and tyrannical but a will that 
is seen through all time making for righteousness. 
Petty tasks grow great, little spheres large, one 
talent grows to five, ten, or fifty in the atmosphere 
of the New Freedom. I am free, free, no subject 
of a tyrant God but the willing abettor of Infinite 
Mind and Spirit which seeks to realize itself in 
its dealings with mankind, the willing helper who 



A Great University ^ Its Course and Degree 57 

chooses to collaborate, being free to reject. Is 
there any freedom of which you have ever heard 
or read to compare with that? 

And with this freedom comes peace. Think of 
that, to be at peace and to be free. What nation 
would not be satisfied with that or what individ- 
ual? Well, upon our great freedom in God 
supervenes peace, the peace of God that passeth 
all understanding. When the soul knows itself 
free and uses that freedom to re-dedicate itself 
to the great purposes of the Eternal, there comes 
to it inevitably a sense of abiding peace, and by 
that we may best measure our progress in free- 
dom. Poor Pilate, though the procurator of the 
Caesar, knew neither freedom nor peace; Jesus, 
the Galilean peasant, knew both. We are per- 
mitted to enter into a like experience, one that 
we can hardly afford to forego, to know the truth 
and to have the truth make us free. 

And so the end of true imiversity training like 
the object in God's school which I have been dis- 
cussing, is the attainment of freedom through 
truth. It is clear that much so-called university 
training, measured by this test, is sadly to lack, 
but the ideal remains. Even so there are many 



58 College and Religion 

who think they are quite far up in God's school 
and have as a matter of fact no matriculation 
standing; never mind, their assumptions cannot 
affect the truth for which God's school stands. It 
is in the combination of the purposes of these 
two . schools, the university and life, that great- 
ness of soul lies, and no one can afford to aim at 
less than greatness. It is for few to attain the 
seats of the mighty but not all the mighty are 
great; we may all be great. Truth's freemen, 
God's noblemen. I hope you will not be satisfied 
till you have added the degree that is conferred 
in the school of God to your academic distinc- 
tions. I do not know any better wish for your 
happiness with which I could send you away ; it is 
the secret of happiness that I have told you. May 
you find it. 



FAINT YET PURSUING 

''And Gideon came to Jordan and passed oveVj he and 
the three hundred men that were with him, faint yet pur- 
suing/' Judges 8:4. 

The primitive traits in our nature are mani- 
fold but elusive; they dwell unnumbered in the 
inner chambers of our spirit and yet we know for 
them no other name than Legion, for they are 
many. They are within us subtle undertones that 
stir to music when in speech or written word the 
charmed vocables emerge that can play the chords 
strung first in our remote forefathers and trans- 
mitted to us by heredity's mysterious laws after 
thousands of years; there are passions that rouse 
them from a sleep that was so death-like that we 
had not known they even existed in us. In a sense 
other than is usually given to the phrase we are 
the "heirs of all the ages" ; there abides in us still 
some figment of those generations that have 
passed before, bound up in the marvel of your 
personality and of mine. And thus it is that 

59 



6o College and Religion 

hearts that are gentle and that have never medi- 
tated violence, feel a surge of emotion, a thrill 
of ecstasy, as they read of the jousts of Arthur's 
knights of the Table Round where spears splin- 
tered and knight and horse went down thunder- 
ously. It is the joy of battle that moved in the 
heart of our remote sires in old, unhappy, far-off 
days when fighting was the rule and peace the 
exception, when men could truly speak of "the 
bloom and the beauty, the splendor of spears." 
And it is because of this no doubt that many of 
the narratives of the Old Testament, utterly to 
be condemned on any logical or humanitarian 
grounds, are still read with avidity by souls that 
in reality are living within the dispensation of the 
Newer and the Better Testament. 

It is among these narratives that the story of 
Gideon which I read you in part this morning 
falls. You recall how it ran. There is Israel's 
primitively conceived God closely following the 
doings of his chosen people and speaking directly 
to Gideon, the marshal of the host. There is the 
self-elimination permitted to the faint-heart and 
the coward, and there is the quaint test proposed 
for the special selection of the instruments of 



Faint Yet Pursuing 6i 

Jehovah's vengeance. There is the Midianite's 
dream and its sudden and fearful interpretation; 
there is the attack with its odd stratagem of 
pitchers, lamps, and trumpets, and that resound- 
ing battle-cry: *'The sword of the Lord and of 
Gideon." And then the pursuit of the shattered 
host beyond Jordan by Gideon's little band, 
"faint yet pursuing." 

A story for a story's sake needs absolutely no 
excuse, and the narrative of Gideon and the three 
hundred is a story of adventure well and graphi- 
cally told. It is a story of resource and courage, 
even if it ends in blood and iron as well. I am 
truly sorry for the person whose blood does not 
pulse faster and whose every nerve does not tingle 
as he reaches this point : 

And the three companies blew the trumpets, 
and brake the pitchers, and held the lamps in 
their left hands and the trumpets in their right 
hands to blow withal; and they cried: The sword 
of the Lord and of Gideon. 

Oh, the rush of that sudden surprise, the wild 
fury of the midnight attack, the glare of the 
lamps, the blare of the trumpets, and the raucous 
chorus of that pealing battle-cry ! 



62 College and Religion 

It is a bad fashion that at once proceeds to 
allegorize in every last detail a story such as that, 
which was to the Israelites no allegory whatever 
but a national legend of surpassing worth. As 
well try to allegorize Sir Walter Raleigh, Drake, 
Frobisher, Hawkins, and Sir Richard Grenville 
of the "Revenge"; they are no allegory to sons 
of the British stock but a part and parcel of our 
rude island story. I do not propose to fall into 
the trap, but I confess that my fancy has been 
caught with one phrase of the story particularly 
as being an inspiration to all who fight even 
though on other fields than those of war; it is the 
phrase that ended the lesson, "faint yet pursu- 
ing." Perhaps I may be excused for making 
through this a transition from Gideon to our- 
selves, from his warfare with Midianites to our 
own struggles with ourselves and our environ- 
ment. 

Not all that I have to say will be appreciated 
as much by you who are young as by those who 
have travelled somewhat further along the way 
of life. You young people can sense the value of 
that word "pursuing," but hardly yet, let us hope, 
has there entered into your lexicon of life the 



Faint Yet Pursuing 63 

word "faint." But it sometimes happens that 
words we hear at one time, fall then upon stony 
ground and bring forth no fruit, while later on 
in other associations they are recalled and spring 
marvellously to life and bring forth a return some 
thirty, some sixty, and some an hundred fold. 
You cannot yet in the merciful providence of God 
appraise the faintness of later days, but I should 
like to think when that faintness comes to any 
one of you, some word of mine may leap to you 
along the years, some word that may^ keep you, 
however faint, still pursuing. As for those others 
of us who have to confess to increasing age and 
occasional spells of faintness under the burden 
and heat of the day, no word of heartening or 
encouragement ever needs a special plea by way 
of justification. You have known what it means 
sometimes to wonder how it would be if some 
morning you just did not wake up at all to re- 
sume those duties that seem to be grinding out 
your very soul; you have been half in love with 
easeful death. Your soul has been rasped and 
torn in wrestling with pitiless detractors and in 
answering false accusations; you have been put 
upon the various racks that society ingeniously 



64 College and Religion 

applies to lovers of the beautiful and the true. 
Your life looks like a failure in retrospect and 
in prospect like torment. You have become very 
faint, and pursuing does not any longer appeal 
to you. You are wrestling in your Gethsemane 
with black doubts; you pray that this cup may 
pass from you, but you are a little doubtful about 
adding as Jesus did: "nevertheless, Father, not 
my will but thine be done." 

It does not follow that your friends or even 
your family know how faint you are ; they see in 
you a little malaise, a bad headache, which leaves 
you desirous of being left alone more than usual, 
or perhaps they find you indisposed to talk. It is 
greatly to the credit of our humanity that so 
many wrestlings of soul, yes, even to the utter- 
ance,, as the old knights used to say, are carefully 
concealed from those who would be unnecessarily 
troubled and disturbed by the black cloud that 
hovers over us. Men fight their soul-battles as 
they go about their business, women as they ar- 
range the details of a household day, and often 
the world is not much the wiser. *'Never morn- 
ing wore to evening but some heart did break," 
but for each one that succumbs there are many 



Faint Yet Pursuing 6$ 

that fight the same battle and win through with 
blood and tears. 

Pursuing seems to me, objectively in the story 
of Gideon and subjectively with each of us, to 
relate to ends and ideals. Gideon's purpose was 
to destroy his enemies utterly; his aim was really 
then to obliterate the object of his pursuit. Our 
end and object is supposedly different ; we wish to 
catch up with our ideals not to destroy them but 
to take them in our arms of affection and make 
them our own. But there is a curious fatality in 
this business of pursuing ideals after all; so often 
as we overtake our ideals, we really slay them, 
and start the pursuit anew. The ideal that you 
set up for yourself five, ten, fifteen years ago you 
have undoubtedly in some measure attained, but 
the attainment was unsatisfying because at once 
you realized that other ideals lay ahead and that 
you had actually caused your old ideals to perish 
and had set out to pursue the new. And so you 
came to understand that there are many senses 
in which "to travel is better than to arrive." 

This shifting character of ideals is something 
that all of us should try to understand. It seems 
to be the fashion for those who undertake to ad- 



66 College and Religion 

vise young people upon commencement days and 
other such high days, to talk to them a great deal 
about preserving their ideals. Well, I fear that 
ideals preserved are like a good many other pre- 
served things, excellent museum material and 
nothing more. What is really wrong with a large 
number of people of mature years but of imma- 
ture intellectuality and spirituality is that they 
literally fulfilled the advice so liberally ministered 
to them and preserved their first ideals till these 
ideals became mummified and their owners with 
them. The advice that would be of real service 
would be to tell them to prepare to alter their 
ideals as soon as they found themselves overhaul- 
ing their first objective, to remind them that 
ideals are not fixed and invariable things, and 
finally to add by way of warning perhaps that 
each new ideal should be higher and harder than 
the last. 

Of course this is harder to explain than the 
other and harder to get understood too, but that 
does not excuse either speakers or hearers from 
the effort. It is disconcerting as well to have to 
learn that no finality in ideals can be prescribed. 
In that respect ideals are like learning. There is 



Faint Yet Pursuing 6j 

no finality in learning; learning is a quest of which 
we do not know the end. The end of learning is 
not the acquisition of a body of facts to be dis- 
charged upon the head of some luckless examiner ; 
it is the pursuit of matter-of-fact truth from one 
of her lairs to another. The attainment of some 
particular point in this quest brings no finality; 
becoming a B.A. or an M.A. or a Ph.D. brings 
no release so far as the cause of true learning is 
concerned. Learning is a road that runs up a 
hill and tops a crest over which we cannot see. 
Ideals likewise are elusive; we pursue them from 
one stage to another, and, if we are the right sort, 
we shall be pursuing them to the journey's end. 
But I hope that no one will think that the alter- 
ation in ideals which is the mark of a truly pro- 
gressive life excuses one altogether from the at- 
tempt to cultivate ideals. As well say that be- 
cause there is no known finality to learning, we 
should abandon research and give up the cult of 
knowledge. Humanity well knows that we can- 
not certainly descry the end of knowledge, and 
yet in every civilized state large expenditures are 
made to advance that very knowledge the end of 
which is doubtful. And so with our ideals; we 



68 College and Religion 

cannot certainly affirm that you at twenty must 
take an ideal to serve you through all your life, 
or even promise that with a constant adaptation 
of ideals you will achieve a definite goal, but we 
do not think for a moment that this absolves you 
from the necessity of ideals. 

Still, the cynic might ask, as in every age he 
has asked: "Why have ideals at all when you 
admit that the end is uncertain? There are the 
pleasures of life which are understandable, im- 
mediately realizable, and unprovocative of dis- 
cussion about abstract ends." Against this one 
can set with confidence all the belief and the ex- 
perience of the race. Here it is again as it is 
with knowledge. There are hosts of people who 
have little or no use for knowledge in their own 
lives, but they will nearly all join in the opinion 
that the cultivation of truth, the pursuit of mat- 
ter-of-fact knowledge, should be promoted in our 
universities. So with ideals. It is a poor sort of 
business man or professional man who does not 
lay claim to ideals for the conduct of his business 
or his profession; the ideals may be low in all 
conscience or he may in practice contradict them, 
havmg one set of standards for public speech and 



Faint Yet Pursuing 69 

another for private action, but the fact that he 
will talk of ideals at all is a tribute to the power 
of the ideal in the world. Ideals are the voice of 
God to humanity; you may avoid the call of that 
voice as it comes through this medium or that, 
but I do not see how you can actually avoid it in 
human experience and in the consensus of human 
opinion. After all there was something in that 
dictum of St. Augustine's: securus ijdicat orhis 
t err arum. 

And now you will have no difficulty in under- 
standing why in the pursuit of the ideal we grow 
faint. Through the arch of the ideal 

Gleams that untravelled world whose margin 

fades 
Forever and forever when I move, 

and it is just because the margin fades and the 
delectable land retreats before us that we grow 
weary and faint. We yearn for finality; experi- 
ence teaches us that there is none, and we are in- 
clined to resent the discovery. Still, the laws of 
life are here ; they were here before we were and 
will abide after we are gone. They sprang out 
of untracked eternity and to eternity they will 
stand unchallenged. Like Margaret Fuller then 



70 College and Religion 

we must "accept the Universe" and make up our 
minds that happiness is most to be realized in 
conforming to its laws. And of these laws none 
is more certain than just this, that we slay our 
ideal when we attain it. That is why I say so 
often that life is a quest that never ceases. In so 
far as we are true men and women we are all 
Knights of the Round Table questing after the 
Holy Grail, the vision of the perfection of the 
spirit. Among us all there will be few Sir Gala- 
hads to whom was vouchsafed the revelation of 
the holy vessel 

"Clothed in white samite or a luminous cloud" 

but there is no reason why there should not be 
many a Sir Bors who despite imperfections of 
character had a vision which never faded from 
his mind and spiritualized all his life thereafter. 
And remember how the Knights of the Round 
Table fared in that quest, how they endured all 
manner of hard living, how they sojourned in the 
open under no canopy save heaven, how they 
fared afar 

"O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent," 
amid storms and cold, through strange peoples. 



Faint Yet Pursuing 71 

in peril of their lives, and with constant challenge 
of battle; they were often very faint with their 
pursuing, very heart-sick, very weary. To be 
sure we have not the outward glamor of knight- 
hood about us, but it is ours to live the life of 
chivalry none the less; we too may win worship 
by knightly deeds, and we too carry shields of 
the spirit whereon is graven an escutcheon that 
we may not sully upon pain of shame that burns 
and stings. Our jousting days come sometimes 
when we are riding triumphant in the lists and 
bearing down opponents with our well-placed 
spears while the pavilions ring with applause, but 
there are the other days too when the search for 
the ideal carries us far away from Camelot and 
the Table Round with all its goodly fellowship 
into the land of dragons and oppressive men, a 
land where every turn in the woodland trail may 
bring a challenge and a combat. 

There is no purpose served by denying that in 
those days we shall grow faint; it would be but 
contradicting the experience of the elders and 
creating an atmosphere of delusion for the young. 
The real point is to consider what shall sustain 
us in those days of faintness when we doubt the 



72 College and Religion 

value of those ideals we have been following, in 
those days when we would fain make an end of 
further ado. I think there are two such things, 
and you know them as well as I; they are retro- 
spect and prospect. If a situation is bad, the 
only elevation of spirit you can win is gained by 
looking elsewhere, not to the neglect, mark you, 
of the desperate situation, but to the heartening 
of ourselves for handling it. Retrospect serves 
to remind us of those golden days when we 
seemed to be establishing contact with our ideals ; 
they were days of rare inspiration for each one 
who has known them, those days when 

this earth he walks on seems not earth, 
This light that strikes his eye-ball is not light, 
The air that smites his forehead is not air. 
But vision, yea, his very hand and foot, 
In moments when he feels he cannot die. 
And knows himself no vision to himself, 
Nor the high God a vision. 

To lay up by earnest striving the memories of 
such days for ourselves is the best insurance 
against growing faint as we pursue ; they form the 
gallery of the soul where it may in moments of 
dejection contemplate the thing that it hath been 
and draw strength from the view. 



Faint Yet Pursuing 73 

And then there is prospect. We are tempo- 
rarily disillusioned, or our ideals are undergoing 
one of those shifts that come periodically in a 
normal life, and the present seems to afford noth- 
ing to look out upon; with retrospect over 
brighter days let us couple the prospect of days 
ahead when the clouds shall lift again. The wind 
does not always lash the trees nor the storm 
lower from the sky; there is radiance still ahead, 
be sure. From the temporary disillusionment we 
shall recover and with a deeper faith as our re- 
ward; we shall find presently new ideals just a 
little higher than those we have slain by over- 
taking. And apart from all this commonplace 
philosophy, we are Knights of the Great Adven- 
ture, which of itself always irradiates the future, 
and makes the present, however hard, seem but 
a stepping stone to experiences rich and strange. 
It was the spirit of Ulysses of Ithaca : 

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks ; 
The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the 

deep 
Moans round with many voices. Come, my 

friends, 
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. 
Push off, and sitting well in order smite 



74 College and Religion 

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds 
To sail beyond the sunset and the baths 
Of all the western stars until I die. 
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down; 
It may be we shall touch the happy isles 
And see the great Achilles whom we knew. 
Though much Is taken, much abides, and though 
We are not now that strength which In old days 
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we 

are, — 
One equal temper of heroic hearts. 
Made weak by time and fate, but strong In will 
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. 

This is the spirit of the Great Adventure, and 
it comes from one who had grown faint often 
enough in the wars at Troy and the long wander- 
ings after before he reached his rocky Ithaca. 
"Though much is taken, much abides," and he 
knows the worth and the strength of the resolute 
will that recuperates itself. 

O well for him whose will is strong. 
He suffers but he cannot suffer wrong. 
He suffers, but he cannot suffer long. 

But that is not quite all. There is a touch of 
finality to our ideals that I must not pass by; that 
touch is their association with God. All our 
ideals lead up to him and In him find their end; 
just what that end is and its ultimate significance 



Faint Yet Pursuing 75 

no system of philosophy or theology has ever at- 
tempted to show. It is here that faith comes in 
as faith Inevitably must somewhere and some- 
how; God is the end, and we must trust God 
therefore for the validity of that end. And then 
too with regard to the relation of our ideals to 
God, we are to remember that, so far as we may 
judge, this world of God's is incomplete, and that 
for its completion, our collaboration is needed, 
else the work will not be done as it should be. 

Creation's Lord, we give thee thanks 
That this thy world is incomplete. 
That battle calls our marshalled ranks, 
That work awaits our hands and feet. 

What though the kingdom long delay 
And still with haughty foes must cope? 
It gives us that for which to pray, 
A field for toil and faith and hope. 

The real reason, it may be, for this constant shift 
of ideals and for the faintness that comes to us 
in the long pursuit of the unattainable, as it seems 
to us, is that it is a section of the cosmic plan 
revealed In the life of each one of us. The watch- 
word and keynote of the universal scheme would 
seem to be development, and this is an assiduous 



76 College and Religion 

process. It is a process that means change and 
readjustment, and changes and readjustments 
bring weariness oftentimes. Still 

Since what we choose is what we are 
And what we love we yet shall be, 
The goal may ever shine afar. 
The will to win it makes us free. 

The very source of our freedom is the liberty to 
pursue the ideal, and it is this pursuit brings 
weariness, and the weariness earns the liberty, 
and there your circle is complete. Your liberty 
is bought with a price. That too I feel is part of 
the cosmic plan, that there is nothing worth while 
that can be had for nothing. 

Finally then my own consolation in the press 
of unceasing and exacting duties is the belief that 
the things I do are minute but necessary cogs in 
the mill of God, and that the whole machinery is 
impeded to the extent that my part of it is im- 
perfect. I know that if I fail Him, God cannot 
fully develop His work as He would like to do. It 
is as George Eliot wrote in her poem Stradi- 
varius : 

If my hand slacked 
I should rob God, since He is fullest good. 



Faint Yet Pursuing 77 

Leaving a blank instead of violins. 

He could not make Antonio Stradivari's violins 

Without Antonio. 

And thus by the very demands of duty I rise to 
the divine, or realize the divine that is in me. I 
shall be faint but I shall not fail; I shall be still 
pursuing. "The sword of the Lord and of 
Gideon." 



MAKING THE GRADE 

I THINK it is Punch that has a story of an Eng- 
lish loafer who delivered himself as follows: 
"Work! W'enever I 'ears that word, I goes all 
of a tremble!" There are those who without 
being loafers probably feel that way about exam- 
inations; the mere word sets them all of a trem- 
ble. Few there be who look with favor upon 
examinations, but remember that this applies to 
examiners as well as to their victims. 

The examinee thinks that examination season 
is a time when the examiner, a ruthless, cruel, 
calculating and cunning individual, gloats over the 
sufferings of his candidates as they attempt in the 
words of the negro preacher "to solve de insolu- 
ble, to explic de inexplicable, and to unscrew de 
inscrutable." But as a matter of fact (and this 
is quite different from the fiction of it) the ex- 
aminer sees before him but a vista of thirty, forty, 
or even a hundred and forty papers in which the 

same time-honored passages of literature and the 

78 



Making the Grade 79 

same immemorial traditions of science will be ex- 
hibited in unbroken monotony until the drowsi- 
ness of the Lotos-Eaters' Land steals over him, 
and he becomes quiescent over the half-marked 
page, just an ordinary mortal overcome with 
sleep. He realizes as he reads the futility of 
examinations. He knows that they are in some 
respects sheer matters of knack, the knack which 
some students possess for writing papers, that 
often they are matters of mere chance, success or 
failure turning on the last formula at which the 
examinee glanced before he dropped his note- 
book and advanced with a firm step to the scaf- 
fold. Time and again too he thinks he discerns 
under a confusion of words a probability that the 
question is really being answered, and then he 
wonders whether the information is really there 
or if he is not in charity supplying the key that 
unlocks the riddle. Futile they certainly are, but 
just how shall we dispense with them? 

And of course the examinee realizes much of 
this futility too. He knows how much knack 
counts for, especially if he has the gift himself; 
it will spread a little knowledge to a wonderful 
thinness over quite an area. Time and again he 



8o College and Religion 

has probably experienced, now with joy, now with 
sorrow, what matters of freakish chance they are, 
and how even with the best of preparation it is 
still necessary that the luck break with you a little 
at least. He realizes that the last answer he 
wrote was a trifle mixed up, but time pressed and 
he could not go back to amend or clarify. And 
knowing all these things and considering himself 
always and uniquely the sufferer, he is apt to treat 
the whole process as a more or less amiable hum- 
bug and to regard examinations as series of select 
puzzles for the mystification of the student and 
his reduction to a proper state of humility in 
the intellectual world. 

Of course there is justification for all this. 
There have always been and always will be exam- 
inations that are unfair both in conception and 
phrasing. There are papers in which the whole 
object is to show the examinee that he knows 
nothing, others which seem designed to prove 
that the examiner knows everything. This of 
course is wrong. To demonstrate to a student 
his ignorance is poor business unless it be for the 
elimination of conceit or the stimulation of effort; 
to exhibit your learning is a poor piece of vanity 



Making the Grade 8 1 

in a world which is such a guess-work world at 
best. The real object of examinations should be 
to ascertain, subject to all the known difficulties 
of the method, the relation of the examinee to a 
broad summary of the year's work; the more 
minute investigations should have been made 
sooner. But one has to be at the game a long 
time to realize this; the worst examinations are 
those set by very young and very earnest instruc- 
tors who have just got through with being exam- 
ined themselves. 

One of the most delightful things about exam- 
inations is the modesty, real or affected, of ex- 
aminees when the ordeal is over. To be sure, I 
have heard that girls actually get together and 
go over papers they have written and compute 
their percentages, though it seems too horrible to 
be true, but among the lads of my time an exam- 
ination once written was absolutely committed to 
the vasty deep of the oblivious past, and the hon- 
ored formula of reply in event of your being 
asked how you had done in a paper, was simply: 
"Oh, I guess I made the grade." I have called 
it an honored formula; honor strictly required 
that it should be used as well by the proudest com- 



82 College and Religion 

petitor as by the poor literalist to whom the 
phrase was not only an answer to a friend but a 
prayer, in the phrase of Henley, "to whatever 
Gods may be." It was a phrase that apparently 
indicated a fine contempt for results, a noble in- 
difference for fate and its decrees, and a philo- 
sophic recognition of the essential futility of the 
whole business. 

At the same time we were all interested be- 
yond what our fixed and conventional phrase im- 
plied, no matter what our affected indifference. 
The best student wanted to know how far he had 
left the "grade" behind; the student who hoped 
that luck and the examiner's satisfaction in his 
last meal would play into his hands, had but one 
grade in mind and that a humble one, but he had 
it very much in mind night and day. And ap- 
parently there must be many such; are not the 
long lists of equals which regularly terminate our 
class-lists eloquent testimony to this truth? Most 
often "making the grade" looks to the minimum 
of achievement, not to the maximum. 

And so one might go on indefinitely philo- 
sophizing about examinations, but no amount of 
philosophy would remove the examinations, even 



Making the Grade 83 

as while there may be a philosophy which thinks 
away matter, you still cut yourself with a knife 
or bump your head in the dark hall. It has not 
been my purpose in this ramble to suggest a pleas- 
ant age in prospect wherein the wicked examiner 
shall cease from troubling and the weary student 
be at rest. True we have quite a band of amiable 
women who gather at mothers' clubs and such- 
like agencies of what is called uplift, to pass reso- 
lutions against children and young people being 
compelled to learn anything whatever or to prove 
by any method that they have learned anything, 
but society seldom worries much over these pro- 
nouncements and usually smiles the smile of long 
experience at these pacifists of education and 
passes by on the other side. Rather I have it in 
mind to urge that examinations with all their ap- 
parent one-sidedness and unfairness and their ele- 
ments of luck and knack and all the rest, are not 
so very remote from the general experience of 
life, that all life is really an examination in which, 
whether we stop to realize it or not, we are can- 
didates in the presence of the Great Examiner. 
Now this may not reconcile you to life, this hav- 
ing it compared with an examination, but perhaps 



84 College and Religion 

it will reconcile you to examinations to learn that 
they are really a microcosm of life, and being 
reconciled to examinations is very important at 
least several times a year. 

Any examination that amounts to anything is 
of course a genuine test of powers, power of 
memory, power of reasoning, power of expres- 
sion. It is in part a review of work traversed 
but it is also an inquiry into your ability to con- 
vert that old work to new uses. You memorize 
the formulae of mathematics and the proofs for 
these, but can you use them for the solution of 
novel propositions? You can translate all the 
assigned Latin of your course, but can you take a 
piece of unseen Latin and make an understand- 
able rendering of that? You have performed 
certain analyses in your chemistry course; how 
are you going to fare with the analysis of the un- 
known compound that you meet at examination 
time? You will hear a great deal of grumbling 
against examinations because they insist on "going 
appreciably farther than the mere memory and 
trying out the reason as well; this is very child- 
ish if you really believe that a university has 
some duties in the field of education. Well, life 



Making the Grade 85 

goes pretty much as examinations go. There is 
always plenty of review on the back-work, so 
much of it that the most patient of us at times 
get tired and sigh for relief from monotonous 
and humdrum duties, and perhaps it is because we 
get rebellious that we do not always make the 
showing we should on this part of life's paper. 
We are inclined to say; "Oh, I've done that 
thing ten thousand times and done it carefully and 
well; what's the use of bringing this up again?" 
just like the examinee who says: "Aw shucks, 
Professor X. has heard me translate that passage 
half-a-dozen times; why does he come asking for 
it here again on his paper?" and forthwith pro- 
ceeds to do a sloppy piece of work. Perhaps life 
and examinations are both wrong; at all events 
they are curiously alike. 

But life brings every now and then, sometimes 
in very rapid procession, a series of original prob- 
lems for solution, and then the examination be- 
comes critical. Everything that you have ever 
come to know through previous experience, every 
atom of accumulated judgment, is required to 
face the new situation and to reason out the new 
conclusion. Well, did you ever meet the type 



86 College and Religion 

of examinee who, after first objecting to one ex- 
amination on the ground that it needlessly cov- 
ered the old trails again, next assails a second 
examination because it made too much demand 
on the reason? You will find plenty of people 
acting that way in life's examination too. While 
things are going as they have always gone, they 
will be found complaining of the monotony of 
their existence; when life's storms descend upon 
them in the form of loss, sorrow, frustration of 
plans, sickness, situations which call for reason 
applied to experience for a solution, you will find 
them reproaching God for having deserted them 
or laid upon them a burden greater than they 
can bear. But that is rather feeble. We are 
apt to think poorly of the student who cries : "I 
don't want to have to face any new situation on 
my examination because that is something I can't 
prepare for;" in like manner we have a right to 
sense a lack of moral fibre in one who in life 
prays for tasks equal to his strength rather than 
seeks strength to measure up to his tasks. He 
will not make much of a showing in life's ex- 
amination; he may "make the grade" in the poor- 
est sense of the term, but you will not need to 



Making the Grade 87 

bother looking for his name in the first division. 
He is not the material from which is made a 
Moses or Elijah or Socrates or Jesus or John Hus 
or Savonarola or Galileo or Cromwell or Lin- 
coln or Cardinal Mercier or the other names be- 
fore which we bare our heads. They were con- 
cerned with something better than making the 
grade, and so have won immortality. 

Examinations are not ideal arrangements; no 
more is life. Examinations, sometimes by malice, 
more often by Inadvertence, are unjust; life is 
likewise full of little Injustices which are usually 
the result of carelessness, forgetfulness, or sel- 
fishness, and of greater injustices which can be 
set down mostly to sheer malevolence, and you 
have to take these injustices little or great along 
with the rest of the paper. A good deal of your 
education comes in the handling of these, and the 
test of your education will lie in the manner of 
man or woman you emerge from this part of the 
test. And remember that the real examiner who 
knows his business, never reads very far In the 
answer-paper before he discovers the error of 
Inadvertence In the paper that he has set and 
makes due allowance for it; so too I doubt not 



88 College and Religion 

that God, the Great Examiner, as he looks over 
the answer-papers of life realizes how unfair his 
paper has been at times and in places to poor, 
stumbling individuals, and just cancels the score 
in the Book of Life. 

The grades are hard to decipher in the returns 
from life's examinations except for the few con- 
spicuous firsts we have all agreed to recognize. 
We are not very certain about our own perform- 
ances, and the best people in the world, like the 
pleasantly diffident students I mentioned, will 
hardly do more than express the hope that they 
have made the grade. We are in the situation 
of a large class after the papers are handed in; 
certain ones, we know, have passed and passed 
well, but the fate of the general run of the class 
is in the hands of the examiner. So we stand in 
life. Some certainly have "made the grade" by 
devoted lives and heroic deaths ; the common run 
of us write on and the Great Examiner in no 
way signifies what the result is. For ourselves, 
we shall probably learn only otherwhere how^ 
well or ill we wrought; others who remain after 
we have passed on, may be able to say of us that 
we got through. If dying we still live in a tender 



Making the Grade 89 

heart or two that was the better for our living, 
I doubt not that, whether with distinction or no, 
we shall have made the grade. 

St. Paul saw well enough that there are no 
one hundred per cent papers in life's examinations, 
and so he wrote : "We have all sinned and come 
short of the glory of God." Most of us are 
humble enough to admit at each day's end that 
the result St. Paul indicates is correct; what 
bothers us at the day's end is the sense of failure 
that it often brings, the sense that we cannot 
truthfully cry *'Vixi! I have lived!" The glory 
of God is our ideal, the finest moral and spiritual 
ideal we can form for ourselves, not some phys- 
ical nimbus or halo, as some people seem to think, 
who have never got any further through the 
wilderness than Mt. Sinai; it is the sun of our 
hopes, the star by which we steer our way, a sun 
that glows and a star that brightly beams, 
illumining all of life if we will but suffer it. 
The ordinary ideals of our life we sometimes 
overtake; this is in us the infinite ideal, and of it 
we necessarily fall short. But there is no need 
for gloom over that, no need to found upon St. 
Paul's word some appalling theory of everlasting 



90 College and Religion 

damnation by an offended God; the real gloom 
is for those who reck nothing of the glory of God 
or of the fact that they fall short of it. They 
simply isolate themselves from moral develop- 
ment and lose much of the zest of the life that 
now is, and, I should conjecture, imperil their 
chances of progress in any life to come that there 
may be. 

I have spoken once or twice of the Great 
Examiner under whom we are all candidates and 
whose papers we take, consciously or uncon- 
sciously. It is not possible to say much of Him 
because His revelation of Himself is such an in- 
dividual experience that it almost eludes telling 
and in the telling seems to lose its certainty and its 
charm. But those who have known Him best, do 
not report Him as the stern and savage Examiner 
of whom we have so often heard, always more 
ready to pluck a candidate than to pass him. 
Indeed if He were such. He would be no fit 
Examiner in the scheme of the Universe, and 
God and the Universe are one. You as students 
would have a very poor opinion of a notorious 
"plucking" examiner who stopped more people 
than he passed because it suggests to your mind 



Making the Grade 91 

injustice, and we may not form a conception of 
the Great Examiner which is unjust, which re- 
flects upon His justice. The conceptions of God 
in the past were not flattering in this regard; now 
through the influence of liberal thought we feel 
that God as our Examiner wants to find out, not 
how bad we are, but how much progress we have 
made in appreciating the good, the beautiful and 
the true. It is true that He does not set easy 
papers, but He sets no papers that cannot be 
done, although some can be solved and answered 
only with blood and tears. And they must be 
taken; we cannot decline God's papers, because 
we are in fact at work upon them every minute 
of our lives. 

And that is the way in which the Great Ex- 
aminer's papers avoid the charge so often laid 
against examinations, that they have the result 
of encouraging a cram towards the last. I am 
afraid that there is no cram towards the last that 
will avail us much in God's papers ; I have no con- 
fidence in mystic formulae which will at the 
eleventh hour save the situation and suddenly 
prepare an obviously unprepared candidate. 
That might possibly work at times in the 



92 College and Religion 

academic life; it will not work here. The ex- 
amination is continuous; it Is the building of 
character, and character-building is a process that 
is life-long, and it may be longer than even that. 
It Is folly then to postpone any distinct effort on 
this examination; "now Is the accepted time and 
now Is the day of salvation." Begin to think, 
not priggishly but seriously, of thoughts, words, 
and deeds, as part of your examination mate- 
rial, and study day by day to frame your answers 
a little less short of your own best ideal, which 
stands to you for the time being as the "glory of 
God." Then again — and this is good advice 
both for man's examinations and for God's — do 
not fasten your gaze too much on the examina- 
tion material but keep an eye on the goal. It Is 
bigger than the processes that bring you there, 
just as an education is bigger than Math. 6 or 
Latin 51. And only by cherishing the golden 
vision of the goal both in education and in life 
shall we escape the soul-weariness that examina- 
tions always bring; it Is the will to win the goal 
that emancipates us from examination drudgery 
and makes us the free sons of God. 



COMMENCEMENT 

This Is the ceremony which the English call 
''convocation." For myself I prefer the New 
England term "commencement." Convocation 
suggests to my mind all the dignitaries on the 
platform, governor, justices, chancellor, presi- 
dent, deans, professors. In a quite dazzling and 
unintelligible array of hoods and gowns and caps. 
But to the reflective mind these are not the figures 
of interest on the day of graduation; the vital 
feature is the galaxy of young seniors in the audi- 
torium below, whose gowns are simple black and 
whose hoods do not so much suggest a spectro- 
scopic analysis. It is of them we should be think- 
ing; it is their day of days when the period of 
academic preparation is completed and they are 
ready at last to "commence," to enter upon the 
larger field. By all means let it be "commence- 
ment," which turns the spot-light on the proper 
place! 

It Is a pretty thought contained in that word, 
93 



94 College and Religion 

rather a heartening thought too for a good many 
of you, I imagine. College days have been so 
joyful and on the whole so carefree despite pro- 
fessors, classes and examinations, that to some 
this day we call "commencement" takes on rather 
the aspect of the everlasting end of all things; it 
seems impossible to visualize life without the 
accompaniments I have just mentioned, and from 
what we cannot visualize, we usually shrink. 
And so these to whom I have just referred 

feel like one who treads alone 
Some banquet hall deserted. 
Whose guests are fled, whose garlands dead. 
And all but he departed. 

But courage ! Life does not consist merely in 
the repetition of one type of experience; its mar- 
vel and wonder is made up in the succession 
of different experiences. You remember how 
Shakespeare has put that view in his seven ages 
of man; what he states cynically, I believe in 
practically as the thing that gives savor to living. 
It has been good to be a student, it has been a 
time of rare joys, wonderful friendships, ripen- 
ing knowledge, frolicsome diversion; all true, but 
would you deliberately choose to remain forever 



Commencement 95 

an undergraduate? No, you would not even if 
you could, because an instinct tells you it is not 
the law of the best life to live in a state of 
arrested experience, no matter how high or holy 
that experience may be. "Lord, it is good for us 
to be here," said Peter on the Mount of Transfig- 
uration, "let us therefore make all preparations to 
stay here," but God knew better and drew the 
vision to a close so that with Jesus the disciples 
might return to the plain to pick up the thread of 
hfe once more in the field of action. i\nd so I 
have said that if any of you are feeling just a little 
gloomy about this day which marks the end of 
your undergraduate course, you should find cheer 
and encouragement in this good word "Com- 
mencement" which will serve to remind you that, 
while no doubt much is left behind, it is left be- 
hind only that you may step through the open- 
swinging portals into a larger life. 

Let us think for a moment of what you are 
leaving; I do not refer now to the frolics and 
the fun and the friendships, but to the proper 
work of a university. You are leaving the place 
where for the first time in most cases you came 
to know intellectual responsibiHty. You came to 



g6 College and Religion 

the university from the routine discipline of the 
school-room; that has been gradually relaxed 
through your several years until at the last lec- 
tures had quite succeeded recitations, and in the 
happier instances, frank conversation between 
student and teacher had succeeded lectures. In 
this way you were learning to stand intellectually 
on your own feet, and so gradual on the whole 
has the process been that your instructors have 
realized the change better than yourselves. 
Well, you must leave that process behind now so 
far as further formal development of it at the 
hands of your college instructors goes; the ques- 
tion for you is, are you going to leave it behind 
actually as well as formally, or are you going 
to carry out into the new life, the commencement 
of which lies so near, this principle of intellectual 
responsibility for yourself? In the church, in the 
political party, in the community, are you going 
to lean or are you going to do your own thinking ? 
The great test of your education is the capacity 
it has developed in you to think straight and to 
think through; are you going from your very 
commencement to demonstrate that in some sense 
you really have gained an education? Your 



Commencement 97 

answer is a very vital concern to the social group 
of which you are to constitute a unit. 

I have used the phrase "to think straight"; 
that implies that you do not allow yourself to be 
drawn in this direction or in that overmuch by 
bias, prejudice, or distorted vision, but that with 
your eye fixed on the Pole Star, you steer for the 
goal of decision. "Shun thou extremes," save in 
those crises which will arise from time to time 
when, as Sumner, the great Massachusetts Sena- 
tor, said upon the issue of slavery: "There is no 
other side"; ordinarily have much regard for the 
arguments from this side and from that, and 
decide in calmness the issue. I am not pretend- 
ing that this is any simple or easy thing, or a 
thing in which men and women ordinarily succeed 
very well, but it is for you above all people to 
try in virtue of your education. 

You are leaving behind you your instruction in 
intellectual method, thinking straight, and your 
instruction in intellectual aim, thinking through; 
you are also leaving behind an atmosphere con- 
sciously permeated with the love of the true and 
the beautiful for their own sakes, a little kingdom 
in which the rarest treasures are often "all the 



98 College and Religion 

charm of all the Muses flowering in a lonely 
word," or, it may be, the discovery of a new star- 
world swimming into our astonied ken. It is the 
realm of the Mind, a realm where all who com- 
prehend are kings and there are no slaves. I 
hope you have learned to think well of that en- 
chanted garden which you can carry with you 
anywhere if you really love its brooks and flow- 
ers, so that the darkest place can be made light 
and the hardest road easy and the roughest places 
plain and the saddest days more cheerful and pain 
relieved and death assuaged in the contemplation 
of that garden and in sweet recollections that 
gather around it. Do not forget it as you go 
out into a world where thought for its own sake 
and beauty for its own sake is rather at a dis- 
count, the world whereof the poet felt wearily 
obliged to write 

The world is too much with us; late and soon, 
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers ; 
Little we see in Nature that is ours; 
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! 

That single inspiration which above all others 
a university training should provide is such that 
he who has received it can afford to laugh at the 



Commencement 99 

person who tells him that the real prizes of life 
lie elsewhere than in the life of the mind. 

But do not understand me as warning you at 
the very time of the commencement of your life 
in the world, against that world. It is not an 
ideal world, but good, bad, or indifferent, it is 
our world, and we must treat it as such. There 
is much justice in Thomas Carlyle's grim re- 
joinder when some one reported to him that 
Margaret Fuller, the great transcendentalist, had 
said: ''I accept the Universe." "Egad!" said 
the Chelsea sage, "she'd better; she's in it!" I 
do not warn you after the manner of some against 
loving the world and the things that are in the 
world. It is in many ways a great world, surely, 
full of wonderful experiences, opening many ave- 
nues of interest and usefulness before us, offering 
posts that it is honorable to fill, containing untold 
store of objects of art and beauty; it would be 
folly to advise you against that world. All I 
asked was that in that world you should seek to 
maintain some sort of mental perspective, a 
wholesome respect for thought, for straight 
thought and for thought leading somewhere. 
Sometimes, it is true, such an attitude will find 



100 College and Religion 

you cutting prejudice against the grain, but if 
you have the grace of speaking the truth in love, 
which seems to me as a virtue to overtop faith, 
hope, and charity, you will be able in the end to 
make the old world hear you. 

Let us now for a little turn from the old life 
to scan the design of the new more closely. On 
your commencement day you stand fortunately 
on one of life's ridges from which you look back- 
wards to be sure, but forwards as well; you con- 
template the plain and the foothills along which 
you have come to your present eminence, and you 
see that to gain the next ridge, you will have 
to go down through a valley, the Valley of Ad- 
justment, I should call it, your freshman year in 
the post-graduate university of life. What shall 
be your aims and hopes as you prepare to leave 
the elevation which for a short space you gain 
on Commencement Day? 

There are three attitudes in any one of which 
you may leave college, the attitude of the indif- 
ferentist, the frankly selfish attitude, and the atti- 
tude of) helpfulness and service. Of the two 
former I dread most indifferentism for any one 
of you. I can conceive of a selfishness directed 



Commencement loi 

towards noble ends, and solely or chiefly vitiated 
by a desire to figure in the world's approving 
gaze; Laodiceanism is more serious. I do not 
mean that there are not just compromises which 
can and indeed constantly must be made in life, 
but what I want to urge upon you is this, the 
pleasure and the privilege of having a few definite 
convictions. One gets out of patience with the 
"perhaps's" and the "may he's" and the "I didn't 
mean's" and the "can't really say's" of so much 
of our modern conversation, which leave one 
wondering whether he is dealing with vertebrates 
or jelly-fish. Hold at least some few definite 
opinions, not dogmatically but upon thoughtful 
and reasoned bases, and be prepared to maintain 
your ground courteously but firmly in the face of 
opposition. This does not preclude you from the 
possibility of changing your opinions in the light 
of better evidence and more mature considera- 
tion; indeed, if in the next five or ten years you 
have not materially altered most of your present 
ideas, I should suspect that mental ossification 
had set in. 

But if you escape indifferentism and avoid 
selfishness, there still remains the question of 



102 College and Religion 

what is the helpful and the serviceable in life. 
I wish here to record my dissent from much ad- 
vice and exhortation that is put forward under 
this head; I mean that wild urge toward social 
service and the like which is so zealously applied 
by good-intentioned people to college graduates 
of recent standing. The young college graduate 
is a natural mark for every enthusiast connected 
with such enterprises; he is regarded as a useful 
ally because of his education, and as a person 
who having neatly canned the products of four 
years' thinking, will never have to lay in any 
further store, but is available for committee 
meetings and executive meetings and conferences 
night and day. Consider carefully before you 
thus commit yourself. Your education is but 
just begun; it is, like everything else at this time, 
but at its commencement, and you need most of 
the time and leisure which will be yours for the 
next two or three years for consolidating by read- 
ing more extensively those positions already 
roughly established in college work. The great 
trouble with so many people is that in reading 
the second of the terms of eternal life which 
Jesus laid down, they do not preserve an even 



Commencement 103 

stress throughout, and yet the injunction reads : 
"Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself/* And 
I strongly believe that in many cases there will 
not be much profit derived by neighbor from 
being "loved" by some social worker who has 
not taken the time to improve himself. There 
is no sense in going out to lift humanity up unless 
you are really sure that you are on a higher level 
than they. 

This much by way of warning: it would be 
equally regrettable that you should merely wrap 
your talent in a napkin and bury it so that you 
might present it at least undiminished to your 
Lord. The first duty awaiting you is this, that 
you should perform with the utmost efficiency 
and devotion the work which is given you to do. 
You remember how the apostle puts it, "he that 
teacheth, on teaching, he that exhorteth, on ex- 
hortation, he that ruleth, with diligence." That 
is the first thing; that duty rendered, engage in 
some form of social activity, but without violence 
to the need of your own soul for study, refresh- 
ment, and repose. If there be those who feel 
no need of these, well and good, — for them, that 
is, though I doubt if it is well and good for the 



104 College and Religion 

rest of us, — but the educated man must have them ; 
it is doubtful if he is an educated man if he does 
not want them, and it is certain that he will hardly 
remain an educated man if he does not get them. 

You will see that I am not proclaiming to you 
that it is your duty to sally forth into a cruel 
world to slay dragons, to liberate oppressed 
princes, or to redeem princesses laboring under 
some magic spell; all that is very romantic and 
appealing, and there will be many commence- 
ment speakers to dwell upon the glorious careers 
opening before you. I am seeking rather to hold 
up for you an ordinary, common-sense ideal 
which may serve to sustain you as you gradually 
discover that it is but seldom that our feet cross 
the trail of true romance and that for most of 
us life is the daily round and the common task. 
Still, it is the faithful performance of that round 
that makes civilization possible, and as for us 
individually it may be that in the grind we be- 
come more perfectly polished gems. 

I have said a good deal about loving yourself 
and a little about loving your neighbor, but there 
is yet one thing needful; there is the first com- 
mandment of the simple duologue of the Man of 



Commencement 105 

Nazareth, in which is enjoined upon us the love 
of God. To explain to you what the term signi- 
fies to me would be an address in itself and is 
moreover unnecessary to our purpose; whatever 
our several interpretations, in the end it comes 
to this, that if we feel we can conscientiously use 
the phrase *'love of God," we are recognizing 
some sanction upon life other than such as are 
merely obvious, that our souls reach out beyond 
the bourne of time and space and seek Him who 
is Eternal, abiding in the heavens, tliat we believe 
in the great purposes of this Eternal whom we 
call God, and are convinced that He stands in 
such a relation to us that it is indeed true that 
believing in Him, we shall never perish. It is the 
third of three animating ideas which most of us 
feel we need; we must first get into harmony 
with our own self, next, relate that self to society, 
and, finally, achieve a philosophy of our position 
in regard to the Infinite, the Not-Ourselves. _ I 
should think, at all events I should hope, that 
your years in college have not made this last task 
any less possible for you, but rather far more 
feasible and attractive. It will be strange indeed 
if difficulties have not arisen by the way, it will 



io6 College and Religion 

be strange If your thought of God is quite what 
it was four years ago, but God will be God just 
the same; the point simply is that He has given 
you a new revelation of Himself in a dozen fields 
of thought, and your conception has altered and 
expanded. As I have said, I cannot presume to 
dictate any ready-made theology on which we 
could all agree, but I should like to feel that we 
are in tolerable harmony on this at least, that 
back of Diversity lies Unity, back of Discord, 
Harmony, back of the Transient the Eternal, 
back of Man and Nature, God, and that we are 
dignified in our mortal existence with the great 
privilege of being His collaborators, fellow-work- 
ers together with Him in the achievements of pur- 
poses which are ultimate, even if we cannot 
always see the goal. There is a great dignity 
lent to human life by such a belief, and ennobling 
is just what you will often feel your life requires 
as the bloom of youth begins to fade. Youth 
In itself ennobles life at one stage with the sheer 
joy of living; later, when the pulse beats not so 
fast, you will find the need of some high calling 
of God to make life seem worth while. I trust 
that at such a time some word, thought, Inspira- 



Commencement 107 

tion of your college days may be the golden key 
for the solution of your problem; a university 
that has done something for the spirit as well as 
for the mind is gratefully remembered as an 
Alma Mater. 

Some of you, as I hinted, are thinking of things 
as finishing because your course here is at an end, 
but really you are just toeing the mark for the 
race of life. It is actually a relay race in which 
you are the next team, the team to whom your 
immediate predecessors hand on the torch. 
Yours is the task to hold it high, to keep it burn- 
ing brightly, and to deliver it without fail to those 
who shall in turn follow you. 



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